University Gifts of $10 Million or More Held Steady in 2018

Title: $10M+ Gifts to Higher Education

Organization: Marts & Lundy, a fundraising consultancy

Summary: Gifts of $10 million or more from individual donors to colleges and universities held about the same in 2018 as in 2017 in terms of the number of those gifts and the total amount given. Factors such as tax cuts for wealthy donors and the growth in donor-advised funds didn’t spur an increase in big gifts as some in the nonprofit world had predicted.

High-profile institutions continue to land many of the largest donations. Notably, Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion pledge to Johns Hopkins University last year kept the total amount from gifts of $10 million or more from falling below the previous year’s total.

Among the findings:

• When looking at all gifts of $10 million or more to any cause, 74 percent went to colleges and universities in 2018, the same as in 2017.
• The value of gifts to higher education increased by 3 percent, from $7.72 billion in 2017 to $7.96 billion in 2018. But such giving is up 29 percent from 2016.
• The number of those contributions grew by only 1 percent, with 208 being given in 2018 versus 206 in 2017.
• Without contributions of $100 million or more, revenue from gifts of $10 million and above would have been slightly down from 2017 to 2018.

The annual analysis by Marts & Lundy gathered data from the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s online database of gifts of $1 million or more and gift announcements on Twitter.

To read more about how much wealthy philanthropists have given to charity and which organizations received some of the largest gifts in 2018 and in previous years, see the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 report of the biggest donors.